Some students may feel they need coffee to help get them through their maths homework, but can maths help with making coffee? Scientists think it can as I heard from our correspondent.
Well, scientists wanted to make a mathematical model of the perfect cup of coffee using a drip filter machine. So they used equations to perfectly simulate or as much as they could the conditions inside the drip filter. So they really wanted to use this to design better machines.
Yeah, you wouldn’t have thought there were that many variables when it comes to making a cup of coffee. How much difference does it make?
Well grain size is a key thing. I mean when you’ve got larger grains and water flows through them more quickly, it tends towards a more watery cup of coffee. You got smaller grains and water flows through them more slowly, and that tends towards a bitter tasting coffee. People want to tailor it because there’s a big market in this. And you know the drip filter machines are increasingly coming within the home. So people want to kind of do it from that angle, getting the coffee out of the beans and working backwards to find out what parameters you need to achieve it.
But presumably because each person has a different taste, it’s gonna be difficult to come up with just one formula.
Yeah, that’s right. There’s no specific formula but what they might be able to do is by this mathematical understanding, make machines more precision, use a more scientific approach so that you can vary the grain size, vary the water flow through it. And that will maybe you know just allow you to kind of get closer to that ideal of your perfect cup of coffee, not too bitter, or maybe a little bit bitter or more watery, however you like it really.
So is there an actual equation?
There’s lots of equations that they used. What they described it as was the way that they use fluid mechanics to understand Formula One, so there’s lots of maths involved in designing Formula One cars now. And that’s they want to do for the drip filter machine. You know, the coffee market is huge. It’s 100 billion a year. And there’s about 16 million coffee machines sold each year in Europe. There’re lots of other things they don’t understand like the way that the coffee moves around when it’s going through the filter. And they also want to know how you put the water in. That’s a key thing that affects the tastes. And there’re lots of big companies putting resources into you know really refining the technology behind some of these machines. So I think it’s fully going on at the moment. You might see improvements in next five years and next ten years.
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